A cold dawn in the mountains
Note: if you are of a sensitive disposition and hate the idea of hunting, please don’t read on as I have no wish to offend anyone and whilst I haven’t posted gory pictures of the animals we took, I am not apologetic about my choice of hobby.
It was time for the long awaited overseas trip with #1 son. We had booked pre Covid and of course, we’d had to put it on hold while the developed world worked out what was happening with itself. The developing world didn’t care of course, as they had much bigger issues to deal with, but for us, it meant that we had put the trip off twice, but eventually the date rolled around and we fitted it in by kind permission of #1 sons lovely wife, who had just had a baby, the very patient, Mrs Jerry who had to keep working to pay the bills and my mate ‘Frank’ who altered his stint out in the Ukraine to cover my holiday.
I usually make a habit of packing a few minutes before the taxi arrives to take me to the airport but this time, I had been squirrelling away pieces of kit and clothing for the trip for several months, so it was a fairly simple task (famous last words) of shoehorning everything into a fairly new and quite flash ‘national geographic’ branded suitcase that I had purchased whilst overseas to replace the supposed ‘tough case’ that had been badly damaged under suspicious circumstances whilst doing a border crossing from Moldova into Ukraine.
In order to actually get to the long booked and postponed flight, we had to leave the house at 3am. I ran through the mental checklist of Covid linked paperwork in the cab and figured that we had things covered. This was to be a hunting trip and I really wanted to take my favourite rifle but bureaucracy had conspired against us, making it so complicated that we didn’t have time to make it happen and I ended up relying on a ‘loaner’ from our guide. As it happened, that wasn’t an issue, but that’s for later.
The flight to NZ was short at around 3.5 hours and pretty quickly we flew over the amazing NZ Alps and into Queenstown. Not only was there a lot of paperwork and app filling out prior to the trip and but in order to go through customs, as usual, there were a lot of quarantine related questions. Jerry Junior had confessed to having been in the Australian high country, just a few days before the trip and that meant that he had to ‘show and tell’ his boots, gaiters, binocular harness and penknife for everything to be declared free of seeds and pests. Not being my first rodeo, I should have realised that he was going to ask me to unpack afterwards, but being slow and not a little thick at times, I didn’t offer my kit at the same time and I ended up unpacking after him, making us almost the first off the plane and absolutely the last to clear customs. Unfortunately in my hurried repacking I ended up blowing the zip of my flash suitcase and having to do a makeshift repair using packing tape.
My rather poorly looking case.
We were picked up by Richard, the friendly owner of the hunting business, who also happened to be a large landowner and sheep farmer. It’s hard for me to do justice to the location and so I am just going to post a few pictures. Suffice it to say, although I have been to many amazing places, I have never been to a more beautiful place than this before. The Burdon family has been on the Glen Dene lease for three generations and it has evolved into a thriving eco tourism, farming and hunting business with people flying in from all over the world. Some of the visitors clearly spend a fortune on hiring helicopters, hunting several species of deer, mountain goats and fancy sheep, all of which have been released onto the huge station over the years and they breed in the foothills of the spectacular mountains. We met one party who were just leaving at the airport. They were from Dallas, involved in the Oil & Gas industry and clearly very wealthy. We were not.
Lake Hawea – yes, it actually looks as good as this!
There’s only one native species of mammal in New Zealand and that’s a tiny bat, so anything non human that walks around here is an introduced species. The hunting here is free range, which means that the animals live their lives out in the mountains and most of them actually die of natural causes – if a hunter doesn’t find them first. A red deer can live for up to twenty years, but most last between ten to thirteen years in the wild, but a torrid rut and a hard winter will kill off a lot of the stags and its not uncommon to see antlers and the deflated bodies in the bracken of those animals who don’t make it to the end of their allotted time, either naturally or at the hands of the hunter. By that age, the stags have grown their biggest antlers and have generally reached their biggest body mass. For a hunter, and if you want to eat meat, you should know how your food comes to be and this also means that taking a trophy stag as they just pass their prime is as good a time as any.
The family also own a small tourist park on the edge of lake Hawea. We stayed in one of the geodesic eco domes on site and not only did they look amazing, they were actually quite luxurious with underfloor heating in the bathroom and a gas ‘log’ fire – essential in the middle of winter, as we were. I say ‘we stayed in one’ of the domes, but we actually stayed in two, as my (alleged) snoring drove #1 son out of our shared dome and into one of his own next door. They were seriously comfortable and warm, with a fully stocked mini bar.
One of the very nice eco domes
We were lucky enough to allocated a guide named Dan Rossiter, who lives locally and when he’s not leading people through the mountains, works as a builder in the nearby town. Dan and Jerry Junior are supremely fit and scampered up and down the steep slopes as I dragged myself up after them using walking poles to steady myself as I’m still not 100% confident on uneven ground after my double hip replacement a couple of years ago. Whilst I certainly don’t consider myself ‘disabled’ Dan mentioned that he had taken a few overseas hunters out into the mountains who couldn’t hike and so didn’t even dismount from the vehicle to take their shots. Whilst that’s not the kind of hunting I am into, that speaks to the both the amount of game, but also to the efforts that the Glen Dene team will go to ensure their clients have a decent experience.
There are a large number of different animals roaming around the station and amongst the most cryptic of them all were the small Chamois goats who will occasionally peer down on you from the highest peaks. They are extremely sure footed and agile creatures who are at home traversing vertical cliff faces. They are so wary and have such incredible eyesight that you have to be very smart to get within shooting range, but people obviously do, as Dan had clients who specifically come out to hunt the Chamois.
My first target species was the large red deer and Dan knew exactly where they tended to hang out and we spent some time making our way up into the mountains in a 4WD, then in a quad ATV and lastly on foot. The weather was constantly on or just below freezing, but we were so hyped up with the hunt, we hardly felt the cold. Glassing the mountain sides with our binoculars, we could see numerous deer, goats, sheep (it’s a working sheep station) and even a couple of pigs racing across the faces. Looking across a deep gulley, we saw what for me was the perfect stag. Symmetrical headgear, a beautiful build and clearly in the prime of his life. Although I was all for dropping him a couple of hours into the first day, I was verbally restrained by Dan who felt that we could do a lot better, so we enjoyed watching him watch us and then he rounded up his females and crossed over the ridgeline and out of sight. We didn’t shoot anything that first day, or even the second and I couldn’t have cared less. Just being there was such an amazing experience.
On our third day, the sun fought to shine through the morning mist and after a great breakfast in the lodge, Dan picked us up and took us to a new part of the enormous property. With the expanse of Lake Hawea behind us, we glassed the snow covered peaks and worked our way down into the gullies. There were a lot of animals around, with several reds, numerous fallow and even some white tailed deer. In a far off high fenced block we could see a couple of huge gold medal* red stags feeding without a care in the world. Their antlers were so extravagant, they reminded me a little of La Sagrada Familia, the Gaudi designed cathedral in Barcelona. There were many deer on the property with impressive but ‘non typical’ racks and as #1 son already has several Sambar to his name we were determined to go for quality and so we were only interested in ‘typical’ trophies, with no kickers or drop tines to ‘spoil’ the tines.
*Antlers are graded in several different ways with the terms ‘gold and silver’ sometimes used to describe the most sought after.
We hiked the mountains all day, only stopping for a sandwich, and whilst glassing over the range, I spotted two deer at distance that looked amazing. We slowly moved closer until we could see one of them was a monster stag wandering in and out of the thick Manuka bushes. Dan estimated that the stags headgear was upwards of 23 points and was so big that he was definitely a gold medal standard animal. As he walked away from us we could see how narrow his hind quarters were and as stags can lose up to a third of their body weight in the rut, he’d obviously been busy. Dan remarked that he was at that the end of his life and probably wouldn’t survive the winter so he messaged the station owner and was told that if we wanted to take him, he’d consider him a silver medal animal, with the corresponding lower cost to us. By that stage, he had settled deep into the hillside vegetation and we could only see the tips of his antlers, so we left him alone.
As we hiked back to the vehicles, the other stag I had taken notice of was still in the general area, grazing along the sides of a fast flowing stream. I could also see that he had a younger stag tagging along. The younger animal was clearly acting as a lookout as he was very wary and constantly scanned the area for danger, scenting the air as he moved. As we were downwind and several hundred metres above him, I wasn’t too worried, but we still took care not to be skylined and give ourselves away. The big male had very pale antlers, showing us that he didn’t spend much time in the Manuka, where the sap stains a lot of the deers antlers in the area a darker brown. That was probably because at his age, he just found the feeding easier and the weather more pleasant in the lower elevations.
Following Dan’s directions, we set up the spotting scope and I confirmed that my stag was classed as a ‘Monarch’, with 16 points on his headgear. After the hike, my heart rate had quickened beyond a comfortable shooting rate and so I began my 4×4 breathing exercises and settled into a comfortable prone position. #1 son ranged the pair of stags at just under 300 metres at a downwards angle of around 45 degrees and that was well within the capabilities of Dan’s 300 WSM Kimber Mountain Accent carbine and within my comfort zone. His Leupold VX6 3-18×44 scope had custom dials on it and we adjusted it for what was now a range of 276 metres. I took aim at the large animal just as he started to quarter away and so had to readjust so as to take him just behind the right shoulder, where I was sure that the 200 grain Hornady Precision round would take him through both lungs and into the left shoulder joint. The excellent Hardy suppressor dampened the sound and recoil to the point that the round hit exactly where I had intended it to and the old stag reared up and immediately flopped back down where it had been standing. The younger stag stood around, wondering what had happened for a few minutes until he realised something wasn’t right and he took off at a canter.
We made our way down to the lower elevation and crossed the stream. As we got closer I could see just how large he was. In fact, it was almost too difficult to move him into a position for a decent photograph. We checked his teeth, which in places were worn down to the gum line, so he’d probably been having difficulty feeding and he had been targeting the softest vegetation he could find. The meat on the animals that are shot on the property is carried out and whilst it can be frozen and taken home, the logistics of doing so to Australia would have been insurmountable for us, so what isn’t eaten in the lodge, is mainly given free of charge to the neediest of people in the area.
I decided that after he was broken down into quarters by Dan, I was going to carry the head and the cape out on my shoulders, which given its weight was bloody silly. I made it down the bank of the creek, across it, up the other side and stopped for a breather, when Dan appeared right next to me and offered to hump it out for me. I wasn’t about to argue especially as I had seen how steep the sides of the gully were. He was like a mountain goat, whose sure footing never seemed to let him down, just as my ‘Bambi on ice’ pratfalls kept everyone else amused.
Number one son took his amazing red deer a day or so later with a well placed shot at almost 400 mts. The huge animal dropped where it stood and when we closed in, it was enormous compared to mine. I do like to think that my animals antlers were nicer, but that’s up for many comparisons over a glass of something in years to come. It was certainly an animal that had been a fighter in its time, with many old scars from duelling with other stags. We were both delighted with Dan’s guiding and pleased with our efforts at getting into the best position to take humane shots.
Speaking of Dan’s mountain goat like feats; after the stag was taken care of, we packed for the next mornings trip out to a place he called Tahr Camp. The camp was actually a cabin, literally in the middle of nowhere. It was simple, but it had everything you’d need and nothing you didn’t. There was 12 volt power with some batteries for the dark hours, a decent cooker and even a gas powered hot shower, if you could wait for the water to warm up from the well.
I could very happily have lived here.
You couldn’t have put the hut in a more beautiful place . The interior was just perfect for a family trip to the hills but our own trio of hunters fitted in just right as there was a seperate double bedroom for (alleged) snorers and numerous beds/bunks in the very warm main room.
Yes, that’s a Tahr skin on the back of the chair
The hut had huge picture windows in the front room that showed off the incredible glaciated valley and I spent the first few minutes there thinking about how I could happily live there permanently. We didn’t hang around for long though and pretty soon we geared up and set off in the truck to the base of the mountains. Once there, there was a wide pebbly river bed with a couple of fast flowing, but relatively narrow streams of water to jump over. Thankfully, my gaiters managed to keep most of the water out of my boots when I fell short!
The Tahr is a large cloven hoofed animal that is related to both sheep and goats and they are native to the Himalayas. They are actually near endangered in their home range but like many of the other mammals introduced to New Zealand, they have become very common in the more remote areas of the mountains.
The spectacular mane on this male is typical of a NZ Tahr.
There was a short but very sharp climb to the first shoulder of the mountain. From the first saddle, I missed a medium range, easy shot on a large male and felt very disappointed with myself, especially knowing that I should have made the shot. A little later I saw an even larger male with an impressive set of horns moving through the bushes on the edge of the tree line and decided that he was the one for me. I stalked closer to him and very quietly got well within 100 mts before taking the shot. This time, he was down and out. After field dressing the animal, I decided that I had reached the end of my middle aged energy and I wouldn’t be climbing up any higher for #1 sons animal and so I picked up the head and cape, fixed him to my backpack and started the descent to the vehicle. It wasn’t an easy hike for me as it was too steep to use my poles and I eventually slid carefully down the steep slope on my backside, trying to avoid the sharp thorns on the bushes. I was a sweaty mess by the time I got down to the river bed and I took a few minutes to get my breath, drink some water and eat a power bar.
About an hour later I heard another distant shot and knew that my oldest son had taken his own Tahr. He had obviously been much higher in the mountains and had chosen his animal carefully. They skinned his animal and packed it out to the vehicle where I had fallen asleep in the late afternoon sun. Around two minutes before they arrived, I was warned of their approach by the drumming of sheeps hooves who had been startled by them hiking through the scrub.
Both of our skins hanging outside the hut to cool off overnight.
Our hunt was over and with a beer in my hand, I explored the area around the hut just as light faded and pondered on the foresight of the owner to build this remote hut on his property. It was obviously a well loved destination as there were photographs of various children and family members on the walls and numerous pictures of hunting and fishing trips over the years. Like many Australians, the Kiwi’s love the outdoors and theirs is certainly spectacular but with far fewer people trying to get into the remote areas. I have read of hunters there complaining about seeing another person on their hike up through the hills, but in comparison to Australia and the US, they really have nothing to moan about. Besides the amount of animals in those hills more than makes up for seeing the odd hiker or wild camper.
Spending time with my oldest son was very special and doing it in style like we did with Glen Dene will likely be something we won’t be able to repeat anytime soon, but I would love to go back out to the mountains of NZ as they really are unique.